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Haitian universities are a lesson in hard knocks

There are only three universities in the country that you’d recognize as such. For most Haitians, studying at any of them was a far-fetched fantasy.

Universite Quisqueya president Jacky Lumarque walks among the rubble on the grounds of his Port-au-Prince campus. (Lucas Oleniuk / Toronto Star)

Jacky Lumarque sees a vital role for his university in Hait. &quot;We're recruiting foreigners for basic management roles,&quot; he said. &quot;That's not nomal. It's the role of universities to train those professionals.&quot; (Randy Risling / Toronto Star)

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI—Jacky Lumarque climbs up a dirt path which winds through his ruined university, delicately navigating chunks of rubble with his black dress shoes, and pausing to shake hands and pat backs of professors and students rushing off to class in a new building that looks more bomb shelter than lecture hall — concrete walls, glassless windows, tin roof.

Men hustle past, manoeuvring wheelbarrows full of jumbled concrete. He stops beside a freshly dug pit in the red earth.

“This is where I lost 15 students,” says Lumarque. “I could save 80 the same night, but 15 of them were trapped under the debris. We were talking with them for more than three days, giving them water, but unfortunately — with no help, no equipment — we couldn’t save them. We saw them dying.”

Lumarque is head of Université Quisqueya, one of Haiti’s most prestigious universities. It’s hard to imagine today, but a year ago this barren hillside was the country’s first modern university campus, replete with amphitheatres, a library, a botanical garden and a museum in the residence of former president Paul Magloire.

The afternoon of Jan. 12, Lumarque was leading Max Chauvet, the owner of Haiti’s largest newspaper, Le Nouvelliste, on a tour of the new grounds to discuss plans for a master’s degree in journalism.

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They stepped out of the museum and boom, the building exploded, shooting his secretary out the door like a cannonball. Over the next 35 seconds, every single building on the new $10 million campus collapsed.

What happened next shows why Lumarque has been hounded — three times, all unsuccessful — to be the country’s prime minister.

He dusted off the tent he’d used to supervise the campus construction and flagged down emergency surgeons arriving from Israel and Slovakia, to whom he spoke in broken Russian. The tent became a makeshift medical clinic where medical students would learn how to clean infected wounds and sooth traumatized psyches.

That same day, 300 patients arrived.

“Haiti,” Lumarque told the students, “is the greatest school of medicine on the planet right now.”

You want to learn about architecture and planning? There couldn’t be a better place than devastated Port-au-Prince — 100,000 homes collapsed, another 200,000 badly damaged and 1.5 million people living in tents and waiting to move back into houses, if the government can finally figure out where and how to build them.

The problem: Quisqueya was one of a handful of universities where Haitian students could get a quality education. The rest were worth just about as much intact as they are now in ruins.

On Jan. 11, the day before the 7.0 quake occurred, there were about 160 universities and colleges in Haiti. Sixty per cent —97 of them — were not even recognized by the state. The majority were the Haitian equivalent of Career Quest — private vocational schools with no libraries, no labs and uncertified teachers.

“There are no quality controls at all, no standards,” says Conor Bohan, who runs the country’s largest scholarship program through an NGO he founded called HELP — the Haiti Education and Leadership Program. This year, he’s sponsoring 150 students at the only six institutions that passed his team’s vetting.

“A lot of these places, they don’t teach you anything. You sit in a classroom and you don’t learn anything of any value.”

There are only three universities in the country that you’d recognize as such — with different faculties offering various degrees. For most Haitians, studying at any of them was a far-fetched fantasy.

Both Quisqueya and its Catholic equivalent, Université Notre Dame d’Haiti, offer good courses at a steep price. When one-third of the country is living on $2 a day, few can afford Quisqueya’s $2,000 tuition. The public Université d’Etat d’Haiti, also considered very good, is practically free — tuition is just $15 a year. But it’s also practically impossible to get into, accepting only 15 per cent of the students who write its entrance exam. Its dentistry schoolhas just 20 spots for the 800 applicants every year.

The numbers have to do with its budget. The state university runs on $10 million a year — about $384 per student. By comparison, York University had a 2009/10 budget of $895 million for 47,000 full-time students — more than $19,000 per student.

Little is spent on research in Haiti. There are very few master’s programs and no doctorates.

Orphny Carvil, vice-dean of research at the state university’s respected school of agriculture, oversees only three research projects for all 450 students.

“The money I was given to conduct research for my own master’s degree in Missouri was more than my budget here for research,” Carvil says. “Much more.”

In a country where everyone says the key to progress is education, there’s been very little progress in the building of an education system.

“Do you understand why this country is poor?” asks an exasperated Wilson Laleau, vice-dean of academic affairs for the state university. “We’re poor because we don’t have any strategy to use resources correctly. Seven out of 10 people in Haiti are under 30 years old. We are a country that should be dreaming.”

The hope was that the earthquake, with all its international attention and money, would change that. At a donor’s conference in New York last March, President René Préval stoked those hopes by pointing to the inadequate higher education in his country. His government has since announced plans for a new modern campus for all its disparate schools at the agriculture faculty, where students now study in outdoor classrooms made from palm fronds.

Almost a year after the earthquake, most of that hope has been smothered. The new state university campus is stalled, having received only $3 million to prepare the land and not the $200 million needed to build it. And the bulk of the government’s $4.3 billion education plan focuses on elementary schools.

The frustration among academics is palpable.

“Who is going to generate our agronomists — the Americans?” says Louis Herns Marcellin, a Haitian anthropology professor at Miami University who runs INURED, an institute aiming to boost educational research in Haiti. “Who is going to train our teachers? We need to have local experts — community leaders, entrepreneurs, agriculture experts. Building brains is the only way we are going to build a sustainable Haiti.

The term brain drain does not capture the loss here. According to a World Bank report, 84 per cent of university graduates — including Marcellin — leave the country soon after graduating. So many new nurses come to work in Canada that one expat in Port-au-Prince compared Haiti to a nurse-fabricating sweatshop.

Just when the country needs all the brainpower it can muster, Haiti is importing most of it — through NGOs and professional companies vying for generous government contracts. Those jobs and pay are desperately needed by Haitians right now.

Since the earthquake, universities across North America and Europe have offered to step in where the government has not. But most offers are of experts, equipment, even curricula to rebuild the country’s universities — but not money to rebuild classrooms and pay professorial salaries. (Quisqueya has lost two-thirds of its 2,000 students, and with them, two-thirds of its income.)

There are some shards of hope. In August, Dominican Republic President Leonel Fernandez broke ground for a new, $50 million, 72-classroom university in the northern Haitian seaside town of Limonade. It will be called “Université Henri Christophe du Nord,” after the famous former slave-turned-rebel who later became northern Haiti’s first president.

And there are those wheelbarrows jostling up and down the dirt path through the remains of Lumarque’s modern campus.

In that spot where 15 students died, the foundation is being laid for a new 15-classroom building and museum, showcasing earthquake-proof construction practices. Engineering students will help build it, learning new skills essential for a new Haiti.

The earthquake taught Lumarque the value of both hands-on learning and volunteerism. The new curriculum at Quisqueya requires volunteer service of every student before graduating.

“Before, we were closed worlds, training good people for the U.S. or Canada. We didn’t even know the country,” he says.

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